Nature study ties carbon majors to more intense heat waves

A major new study published in Nature finds that emissions traceable to 180 of the world’s largest fossil fuel and cement producers have substantially increased the intensity and likelihood of heat waves worldwide, and that dozens of recent events would have been virtually impossible without human driven warming. Researchers analyzed 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023 and concluded that climate change made every event in the set both hotter and more likely to occur, and that emissions from the so called carbon majors accounted for roughly half of the overall increase in heat wave intensity attributable to human activity.

The team, led by scientists at ETH Zurich, combined established extreme event attribution methods with source attribution that ties warming to specific corporate and state producers. Using the EMDAT disaster database to identify events, researchers estimated company level emissions from operations and sold products, modeled scenarios with and without those emissions, and ran statistical tests to quantify each emitter’s contribution to heat wave probability and intensity.

Key findings include median intensity increases across events ranging from about 0.3 Celsius...